Tag Archives: translation

With Facebook being the world’s largest social network it is quite evident that a large portion of its users, the author included, consists of non native English speakers. According to the social network itself 50% of its user base speaks a language other than English.

Skype is now accepting applications for previews of its upcoming Translator feature. Demoed at re/code’s Code conference in May, Skype Translator lets people communicate via VoIP even if they speak different languages.

In today’s EdTech Startups Japan Edition we take a look at three startups that are based in Japan, two of which founded by immigrant entrepreneurs from the US.

Translation platform Gengo surpassed 200 million translated words, Eigooo wants to teach English via text chat to shy students and Mana.bo wants to disrupt the $10 billion Japanese cram school industry.

Way back in the days, in August 2009 to be precise, I hosted a webinar series called the E-Teachers Conference. Around that time crowdsourcing became quite a popular topic among education startup people, especially in the language learning space. The reasoning behind that trend essentially was: if Wikipedia can do it, so can we.

Most notably Livemocha, which used to be the leader of the pack at that time, crowdsourced nearly all of its freely accessible language courses from its global community. While this enabled Livemocha to add new language options at a rapid pace, it also showed the flaws of such an approach: the localizations were mediocre at best.